Mad Dogs And An English Woman.

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Category Archives: In Love

Two years ago today, my Honey-dog came home to live with us. Two other dogs have joined us in the intervening years, but she is still my baby and my best beloved. I waited thirty-four years to find her and she changed our lives completely.

My little truffle-hunting Moomin-pig

She loves her daddy best of all.

Honey with Fudge and Ronnie, her adopted sister and brother. So many smiles!

A happy girl after her Adoption Day pork pie and scotch egg this evening.

It is Sunday. We are leaving the exceedingly horrible Carrickmines shopping plaza-type thing, and my Better Half is driving The Barge (’08 Mondeo estate) out of the underground car park.

“Oh yes,” he mumbles viciously to himself, navigating the very tight bend on the exit. “I’m sure it makes perfect sense to have an exit where you almost have to scrape the side of your car to get out.”

“It might,” I say breezily. “Perhaps you haven’t thought it through, you know. There might be all kinds of advantages.”

“I’m evidently being horribly picky.”

“Yes, you’re known for it. Pick, pick, pick. Although, come to think of it, you can’t’ve been that picky when you were choosing a wife or you wouldn’t find yourself in such a hell-hole on a Sunday afternoon.”

“Hmph. I was very picky when I was choosing a wife!”

I snort derisively.

“I was!” he says earnestly. “Very picky indeed. Because I only like you.”

Over two years ago now, I left this comment on a blog post that Sas wrote. I vaguely recall, thinking back, that I typed it on my Blackberry in the car park of Tesco in Sallynoggin when I was supposed to be doing the shopping. I found it now, when I wasn’t looking for it at all, and it seemed to me to be something that I wanted to post, especially because I find myself, almost two and a half years later, with a house and two dogs and a husband and the sort of peace I never expected I’d be lucky enough to find. So, typos and all, here it is. And I recognise the truth in what was then just an ideal.

“Oh god, yes. It would be so much easier to run, to back away than to have to live with the knowledge that one day they will realise that they’ve made a massive mistake. And then you will have to pick up the pieces & start all over again anyway, but this time you will know what you are missing when they walk away in disgust. I get it. I really do. Because if it got fucked up before, what’s to say it won’t get fucked up again, right?But then what it the one who sees you, really sees you, sees things that you are unable to? Or were toofrightened to admit to? Or couldn’t say because it wasn’t lady-like or proper? What if the person they see when they look at you is the person they most want to see? Even on days when you’re feeling like shit or you’re having a bad hair day? What if none of that is what really matters anyway? What if the thing that they love is your shining, beautiful, perfect-just-as-it-is, loving, trying soul?Hmm?We need to dare to have the big love. I have come to see that. Because otherwise, we might be safe, but we wouldn’t really be living. And also because a super-fit fox like you absolutely deserves to take that chance.xx“

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Remember.

"The comprehension of this Wild Woman nature is not a religion but a practice...
Without her, woman are without ears to hear her soultalk to register the chiming of their own inner rhythms. Without her, women's inner eyes are closed by some shadowy hand, and large parts of their days are spent in a semi-paralysing ennui or else wishful thinking. Without her, woman lose the sureness of their soulfooting. Without her, they forget why they're here, they hold on when they would best hold out. Without her, they are silent when they are in fact on fire. The Wild Woman is their regulator, she is their heart, the same as the human heart regulates the physical body." - Women Who Run With The Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés.